Home-Mobile-7 Days After Mobilegeddon– Everything you should know about Google’s Mobile Friendly Update

28Apr 2015

7 Days After Mobilegeddon– Everything you should know about Google’s Mobile Friendly Update

So here we are, again dancing on the Google tunes and making web a better place! Many have just recovered from the wrath of Google Panda and Penguin and it seems the era of Mobilegeddon has begun. As per the declaration by google it started the roll-out on 21st April 2015. It has been 7 days since the update has started its effect on the global SERP’s and websites.

The Google Mobile Friendly Update aka Mobilegeddon Facts:

It started on 21st April 2015

It affects the website ranking on mobile searches only (tablets search are not affected)

You can google your website name and check out for the “Mobile Friendly” label in your listing

Google Declared: In just the two months since we announced this change, we’ve seen a 4.7 percentage point uptick in the proportion of sites that are mobile friendly, and we hope to see even more in the coming months.

The Mobilegeddon Effect:

A lot of people have been tracking the effect of mobile friendly update after rollout and it does not seem to be very aggressive. Though, we cannot say when one could see a major shift in the mobile SERP’s as well as their mobile website rankings.

Dr.Pete from Moz has been analyzing the update and its outcomes, his analysis shows that even if Google declared the date 21st April for the update, the actual big day was 22nd April. On this day the number of websites with “mobile friendly” label jumped up to 72.3% and has been showing a slow gradual improvement since then.

Marcus Tober, SearchMetrics has been analyzing the early losers and gainer when the update rolled out. It should be noted that many websites mentioned in the list may have been updated to a mobile friendly version now. You can do a little analysis yourself and yes, don’t forget to let us know!

Mobile Friendly Update Top Losers:

The ratio of Mobile Rankings vs. Desktop Rankings has been taken into account so as to measure the difference in performance for mobile & desktop rankings. The lower the ratio, the worse is this domain ranking in Mobile compared to Desktop.

Domain

Mobile SEO Visibility actual

loss in %

Ratio Mobile vs Desktop

reddit.com

874108

-27%

-36%

nbcsports.com

139213

-28%

-40%

songlyrics.com

111042

-26%

-47%

youngmoney.com

10602

-76%

-77%

fool.com

78599

-27%

-49%

isitdownrightnow.com

83067

-25%

-49%

tested.com

3243

-89%

-18%

sidereel.com

88851

-22%

-44%

census.gov

71234

-23%

-53%

onlinecreditcenter2.com

33026

-38%

-39%

odir.us

75586

-21%

-15%

boxofficemojo.com

39951

-33%

-64%

schoolloop.com

50046

-27%

-50%

interviewmagazine.com

42280

-31%

-32%

locatetv.com

65460

-21%

-53%

fnfismd.com

54730

-23%

-30%

etymonline.com

25169

-39%

-77%

reviewjournal.com

22769

-41%

-40%

thinkexist.com

15514

-49%

-68%

sciencedaily.com

45017

-23%

-45%

majorgeeks.com

40374

-24%

-53%

movie25.ag

16324

-44%

-43%

thefind.com

2448

-84%

-49%

megashare.sc

48082

-20%

-64%

walmartstores.com

27157

-31%

-31%

thefiscaltimes.com

4940

-71%

-81%

brassring.com

38315

-24%

-46%

google.es

5830

-67%

-26%

epguides.com

32037

-27%

-53%

krebsonsecurity.com

10451

-52%

-42%

sheppardsoftware.com

39140

-22%

-55%

upworthy.com

17146

-38%

-26%

jobs.net

34174

-23%

-31%

apples4theteacher.com

30268

-25%

-34%

mmo-champion.com

2948

-78%

-77%

webcrawler.com

36291

-21%

-36%

moreofit.com

35610

-21%

-46%

hid.im

14776

-40%

-43%

webs.com

9237

-51%

-54%

ft.com

27984

-25%

-42%

paroles-musique.com

15220

-37%

-62%

jcpportraits.com

14936

-37%

-32%

lottostrategies.co

2717

-76%

-63%

searchbug.com

8885

-49%

-17%

usps.gov

33186

-20%

-25%

ondvdreleases.com

4058

-68%

-17%

barchart.com

10435

-44%

-55%

genealogybank.com

26451

-24%

-53%

sketchup.com

18633

-30%

-19%

zeropaid.com

2550

-76%

-74%

edx.org

13439

-37%

-30%

Mobile Friendly Update Top Gainers:

Here too, we have the Ratio Mobile vs Desktop. The higher the ratio the better are the domain rankings in Mobile than in Desktop.

Domain

Mobile SEO Visibility actual

gain in %

Ratio Mobile vs Desktop

tvtropes.org

290528

420%

23%

foreignaffairs.com

153528

771%

37%

gq.com

178364

67%

19%

w3snoop.com

104573

91%

108%

knowyourmeme.com

153154

32%

13%

bandcamp.com

272302

13%

12%

fbschedules.com

133754

31%

11%

washingtontimes.com

173354

21%

12%

ipaddress.com

89830

51%

71%

imgur.com

118307

32%

24%

free-tv-video-online.info

71972

65%

38%

quora.com

251746

13%

28%

lyricsmania.com

229221

14%

12%

foreignpolicy.com

56583

83%

18%

wtvr.com

43562

124%

67%

sports-reference.com

58155

65%

10%

refinery29.com

100977

29%

19%

macmillandictionary.com

150033

17%

12%

hitfix.com

75004

42%

28%

zacks.com

87375

33%

14%

motherjones.com

200106

12%

14%

dslreports.com

82131

32%

28%

allposters.com

67786

39%

11%

rt.com

89352

26%

10%

easycounter.com

38134

87%

15%

change.org

89739

23%

11%

newrepublic.com

129003

15%

15%

boostmobile.com

54172

40%

11%

stream-tv1.net

18126

548%

151%

newsweek.com

110915

16%

17%

iconosquare.com

93694

19%

31%

watch-series-tv.to

65776

28%

13%

websta.me

112232

14%

23%

800-numbers.net

76397

22%

23%

hypestat.com

30643

81%

172%

pcgamer.com

77815

21%

24%

nybooks.com

95426

16%

20%

advanceautoparts.com

90342

17%

25%

radio.com

53584

32%

11%

newmexicocriminallaw.com

13363

4012%

30%

mp3skull.to

35886

56%

143%

religionfacts.com

24257

107%

24%

thinkprogress.org

64598

22%

20%

wikimedia.org

92805

15%

28%

microcenter.com

41385

39%

13%

kochdavis.com

14444

408%

181%

mixcloud.com

32295

56%

89%

topix.com

114888

11%

12%

fox2now.com

35422

42%

23%

kcci.com

24271

75%

64%

grist.org

20662

100%

30%

stemfireandems.com

10752

2072%

49%

shazam.com

30850

45%

103%

eurogamer.net

45327

26%

49%

So, these were the early losers and gainers for the mobilegeddon. We can assume that 2015 is the year of mobile updates and the web is going to evolve again after panda and penguin. Below we have put in some suggestion for a better mobile friendly website.

Changes other than rankings:

Its not only the rankings that are changing, Google is also changing the way SERP’s are shown on mobile. The changes are not limited to design, google also announced that mobile url will consist of breadcrumbs and they maybe dropping domain in the mobile results. We have noticed the shift for breadcrumbs:

Finally! The takeaways:

If you are new to all this, we understand its a bit tough to get all this into our heads properly. So, to help you overcome this dilemma of yours we have mentioned below some suggestions which you can follow:

Keep the headlines short and specific- You can ask yourself, how will this title look on twitter?

Use Clean URL’s- Google has started to roll-out breadcrumbs for mobile results, in this case you would like to have your breadcrumbs properly structured.

Schema Structure- Update your website with the schema structure, it can help improve relevancy, navigation and generate more engagement. Moreover the search engines love them

Keep your paragraphs short- Your will not love to read a lot of lengthy content on smaller screens. So keep it concise, specific and properly distributed.

Clear Call-to-actions- Keep the call to action distinct and easy to identify. Ensure that a conversion can be easily made by your mobile audience.

Optimize you content- Having short content is not enough, optimize it for higher relevancy. You can consider writing short meta that stand out, proper integration of important keywords in content, SEO friendly headlines, alt text for the images, etc.

We should not forget that google also has many other ranking signals other than mobile-friendly websites. The non-mobile friendly websites will not disappear from the SERP’s and may rank higher if their content provides a greater value to the user.

To keep winning we suggest you to focus on what your user needs. Understand the search engine updates and keeping them in mind try to align your website with your business and audience.

Conclusion:

The Google Mobile Friendly Update aka mobilegeddon has begun. Google did declare the data 21st April for the update roll-out, but the overall feedback stands low as per various analysis by different people of the industry. But, we cannot say when google starts the game, i think, the update maybe bigger than most have expected it to be. For now, we stand the test of time, we will only know the real data & stats once everything settles down.

Founder of SearchMantra a Creative Digital & Social Media Agency as well as a proficient digital strategist possessing profound skills in online marketing, design, UI and UX and years of versatile experience has helped him provide business consulting to various small and large business across the globe.

There are 1 Comment

[…] So here we are, again dancing on the Google tunes and making web a better place! Many have just recovered from the wrath of Google Panda and Penguin and it seems the era of Mobilegeddon has begun. As per the declaration by google it started the roll-out on 21st April 2015. […]

About

SearchMantra is a full service digital marketing agency that specializes in online marketing & design services. Our in house professionals have been selected from the web marketing, web design, programming, PR and online journalism industries. This breadth of expertise, along with an untiring approach to up-to-the-minute industry research, has helped position SearchMantra at the forefront of the dynamic sector of online marketing. Our skills, experience and knowledge-base enables us to bring together technical and creative solutions for our clients.